Award-winning blog for book reviews, author interviews, and anything writing-related.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Interview with award-winning author Charles Porter

Award-winning
novelist Charles Porter joins
me today to talk about the second book in his Hearing Voices series, Flame Vine: His Voices.

Bio:

Born in 1944,
Charles Porter grew up in Stuart, Florida on the St. Lucie River in the same
old wooden house where his father was born.

First going
to public school, then Catholic school, Porter graduated from Belmont Abbey
college with a degree in philosophy. After traveling for two years around the
United States in a camper pickup truck, he went to work in his father's lumber
yard following his father's untimely death in 1963.

From a young
age, Charles trained western horses, worked on a cattle ranch, competed in
reining at local rodeos while he fed a deep love of music and poetry placing
him on stage for a time, as a singer/songwriter.

In 1988, when
he sold the lumber company, his interest in the sport of dressage grew, and now
he devotes much of his time to schooling, coaching, and the buying and selling
of imported horses at Peak Rock Farm.

Continuing to
write poetry and music, in 2006 he turned to prose. His first novel in The
Hearing Voices series was Shallcross,
published in 2015, followed in 2017 by Flame
Vine.

Porter lives
in Loxahatchee, Florida and South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. He has a son,
Michael, who is a circus performer and lives in Las Vegas.

Welcome, Charles. Please tell us about
your current release.

Flame Vine is half a love story from the 20th
century, its foot on the gas of American existentialism. It is the ongoing
story of Aubrey Shallcross, a man who would be dubbed a schizophrenic by modern
western medicine, but who functions normally as a lot of voice hearers do
without coming forward and telling anyone for fear of being anathematized. It
is a historical account, sort of a
bildungsroman of Aubrey Shallcross’s life from the age of six until he is
forty-two. The story starts in 1949 and goes until 1986. The chapters are
ordered in decades through the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and mid 80’s.

What inspired you to write this book?

I am a
storyteller, and was an incredible liar as a child.

Excerpt from Flame Vine:

In the backseat
of his father’s Chrysler on Sunday drives when he was a little boy, Aubrey
would conjure things in the cane, but now as a grownup, it had his full shine.
What was he going to do with this Leda girl he was running with? He craved her
sex and conversation. She said she was tough and cold from the way she grew up,
and he wasn’t going to question her about it. She said they should never say
the word love to each other, the late build of his own thinking after his
father’s death broke his heart and the Blind Spot Cathedral showed up in his
mind. He was not sure he would ever pray or love again, and he made totems of
what he thought might be a hip mental illness—schizophrenia— to live and underwrite
whatever it took to keep him safe.

What exciting story are you working on
next?

I am
working on the sequel to this trilogy in the Hearing Voices series.

When did you first consider yourself a
writer?

In school. It
was obvious that math was not my strong subject, and my adolescent love letters
were pretty good.

Do you write full-time? If so, what's
your work day like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find
time to write?

I write maybe
two to three hours a day, the rest of the time I train horses and do my farm
work.

What would you say is your interesting
writing quirk?

I seem
to only be able to do it mid-morning and around 4:00 in the afternoon.

As a child, what did you want to be when
you grew up?

I grew up in
the Florida ranch country in the time of TV westerns. So the handable standable
truth to that question is, I wanted to be a cowboy—and I became one.

Anything additional you want to share
with the readers?

Oh, maybe
this. When you are in a dead-feel spot, or think you have to do something else
to make things even better than they are in your life, ask yourself this: Maybe
what you always wanted you already have.

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About Me

I'm a NH native and love New England. I love writing about the region, exploring it on foot, on my bicycle, and in my car. There are so many small communities and fun and interesting people in this area, that I could be here a lifetime and not do all it is I want to do. :)

I'm a moderator at The Writer's Chatroom that hosts live chats with guest authors on Sunday nights 7-9PM EST. Join the e-mail list to get notifications of upcoming guests, then stop in and join the conversation!